Keeping Your Cherry-Blossom Storm Quiet.., Can the Sakura Fubuki be silenced? Options

[Feyd-47]

OK, a newby friend of my GM's has recently built a character (we've only just got rid of the crane :D ) that carries two Sakura Fubuki pistols, of which both are silenced. Now, my GM has, quite rightly, asked him to buy four suppressors per pistol for it to be silenced.

This is fine from a purely games rule perspective, as no where have i seen that the Sakura Fubuki pistol cannot have barrel mounts of any kind, but i have to ask, does anyone else find this slightly unrealistic?

It does, i suppose, depend on how the gun works. Personally i assume it runs off todays Metal Storm technology and that it works by firing one round from each barrel sequentially, thus giving it such a high rate of fire with as little recoil as it suffers from. My two major questions about this are thus:

1) Does each barrel, being close together, have enough space to accomodate a silencer/suppressor without fouling the muzzle of it's adjacent barrels?

2) if this four barrelled beast fires the way i've described and can fit the necessary silencing device to it, surely, because each barrel only deals with one bullet at a time, only a silencer is necessary, not a much bigger, therefore more prone to adjacent muzzle fouling, suppressor?

It's an interesting quandry that i'm unsure was considered when the weapon was introduced into SR4. Personally, i don't believe that you should be able to fit a silencer/suppressor to the weapon as i'm sure that it would foul adjacent muzzles, not to mention, with the weapon being a breach-loader, it would make the already cumbersome job of reloading a nightmare in a combat situation.

Your thoughts please, ladies and gentlemen?

[Kagetenshi]

1) Probably not if we're talking independently attached normal suppressors, but there's easily enough room for a giant multi-suppressor.

2) Each barrel does not fire one bullet at a time. The idea behind metalstorm is that one may fire an entire "stack" in a very short timeframe—the gigantic number of barrels you see in certain area denial/antimissile systems are just there because the system is also very parallelizable.

Also, you may have better luck with this question over in the SR4 forum. In SR3, it cannot be silenced because it cannot exist.

~J

[Brahm]

@Feyd-47 Go to the SR4 forum and use the Search function. Set the date to 180 days and search for Fubuki. There is a recent thread and a few older threads talking about this weapon in detail including entries from the artist that drew the picture in the book.

[mfb]

hahah. yeah, sure, go ahead and silence all four barrels on each weapon. and then spend, what, 10 passes reloading, every time? one simple action to eject all four barrels, one simple action to insert a new set of four barrels--and then four complex actions to remove the silencer from each of the four old barrels, and another four to install them on each of the four new barrels.

incidentally, you'd need a suppressor, not a silencer, for the fubuki, unless you plan on not using bursts.

[Kyoto Kid]

The only downfall is the Fabuki is a muzzle loader [ML designation in the description]. Speed loaders only work for revolvers. It would take a character with a reaction of 8 five combat turns to reload. Also the initial high cost of the weapon makes it expensive to have a second one on hand to use when the first runs out of ammo (especially if it is smartlinked).

KK will stick with her 2 Super Warhawks.

I have two guns, one for each of you...
-Doc Holliday from Tombstone

[mfb]

yeah. i was assuming that there'd be some sort of speed-loader for them--not like it'd be hard to make one.

[Kyoto Kid]

[Kagetenshi]

It is a reloading tool. Some people call it a "barrel".

~J

[Pendaric]

Feyd-47 you are verging upon territory, that while humourous, is paved with good intensions. :D

[KarmaInferno]

I would submit that this pistol is possibly one of the worst firearms you could have picked if you wanted silenced/suppressed fire.


-karma

[Foreigner]

Feyd-47:

Theoretically, I'd say that a weapon using the Metalstorm technology *could* be silenced--just not in the sense that you mean.

As I see it, there are two ways to go here:

(1) A suppressed/silenced system in which the devices are disposable, and are actually *built into* the barrel stack, rather than having to be attached; or

(2) a variant of the weapon using compressed gas--dry nitrogen or carbon dioxide, for example--as a propellant, rather than gunpowder.

My suggestion is to see what Raygun thinks. He's pretty much the resident authority on such matters.

P.S.: Kyoto Kid--Val Kilmer's John H. "Doc" Holliday had most of the good lines in Tombstone--including that one. ;)

--Foreigner

This post has been edited by Foreigner: Mar 4 2006, 02:42 PM

[Brahm]

[ShadowDragon8685]

What the hell kind of gun makes you buy whole BARRELS to use? Or did whomever made this thing somehow surpress Metal Storm technology?

[Austere Emancipa...]

[ShadowDragon8685]

If it were a Metal Storm kind of gun, though, woulden't it be firing twelve rounds before it needs reloading? Three-stack in each barrel?

[mintcar]

[ShadowDragon8685]

[mintcar]

What I don't understand is how the accuracy can be the same for each shot, even though the length the first bullet travels along the barrel must be very short compaired to how much barrel time the last bullet gets. :| ??? Isn't this a problem? And what about exaust fumes, or whatever it's called? How can loaded bullets sit safely behind a bullet that is being fired?

[Austere Emancipa...]

The amount of propellant, and maybe also the type of propellant changes between each shot, allowing the muzzle velocities stay about the same even though the actual length of barrel used changes. Still, this can only correct slight changes in barrel length, so the stack only fills up part of the rear of the barrel.

The barrels aren't rifled, and when one shot is fired the projectile behind it flattens a bit, effectively blocking the barrel so that the propellant gases cannot go around it.

Because of the deformed projectiles, no rifling, etc., the accuracy is at best consistently crap.

[ronin3338]

The amount of propellant doesn't change. The barrels are not stacked that deep, and the minimal difference in barrel length should not affect the accuracy much.

That being said, MetalStorm was originally conceived as an area fire weapon, and pinpoint accuracy is not the concern. The company had plans to develop sidearms using the same technology, but their latest updates no longer include those development lines. It may be that they dropped those for the reasons discussed here:
Less accurate on first rounds fired
Difficulty in quick reloading
Bulky and awkward to carry replacement magazines (with existing gear)

Also, just my 2 :nuyen: ... If these are not breech loaded, but instead have whole replacement barrels, then couldn't they integrate the silencer/suppressor on the replacement, so that it could be replaced en toto?

[Arethusa]

They could, but suppressors are expensive and fairly precise pieces of equipment. Much moreso, at least, than a MetalStorm barrel assembly.

[Pendaric]

I will venture that it is a firearm that should fall into the cannot be stealthy catagory, like a shotgun loaded with bird shot. Hence a gun you take for area denial and mass trauma and not for zero foot print/zero tag covert ops.

[Austere Emancipa...]

[Edward]

The manipulation of propellent loads works for weapons where the entire barrel was being replaced but for long arms and lager weapons where you want to have thousands of rounds available (vehicle mounted) it sounds silly to carry that many full length barrels. Better to have ten round mettle storm modules in a belt loading into a weapon like a normal machinegun and fire a 10 round burst each time the belt moves.

Edward

[Austere Emancipa...]